Sony VP mentioned an E3 announcement, but said a surprise may come in the next few months

After releasing the PlayStation 3 console just over six years ago, it looks like Sony is ready to launch its successor as early as this spring.

Hiroshi Sakamoto, Sony's vice president of home entertainment, recently gave some vague details about when we'll finally see the PlayStation 4 in an interview with Chilean site Emol. According to Sakamoto, the PS4 could make an appearance as early as May of this year.

However, Sony's VP was asked whether the new console could make an earlier entrance within the next few months.

"That's still a big secret, but our friends are preparing Sony PlayStation," said Sakamoto in the interview. "I can only say that we are focused on the E3 gaming event, scheduled for June. [An] announcement may be [made] in that minute or even earlier in May."

It is rumored that the PS 4 will have a custom chip based on AMD's A8-3850 with a quad-core 2.9GHz processor and a 1GHz graphics card with 1GB memory.

thing is AMD is (and always been) a champion in bang for the buck department, unlike Intel, and this is exactly what Sony needs for their new console. not the fastest turbo durbo hardware from Intel that is seriously overpriced, but the cheap and fast enough stuff from AMD, the company who knows how to build fast chips for much lower price than Intel. besides Bulldozer was pwning best Intel chips in heavy multithreaded tasks and this is where console gaming is headed. probably Sony with their multithread crazy Cell chip noticed that trend too and decided that AMD is not only cheap but best in heavy threading too. no wonder they went with Bulldozer or something

AMD might not even survive 2013. As for the bang for the buck department that would be ARM not AMD and that would have at least given the compatibility with the PS Vita. Sure AMD is bang for your buck WITHIN the x86 compatible world but x86 compatibility means nothing to the PlayStation brand. If they weren't going to stick with a Power based architecture (like the Cell) they should have at least gone for something like an ARMv8 based SoC with integrated Rogue GPU and a separate nVidia Kepler or AMD Southern Islands based graphics chip. Then they could run it in low power compatibility mode to run shared PS Vita/PS4 downloadable games (with the AMD/nVidia GPU disabled) and ramp it up to 64bit full speed CPU with the AMD/nVidia GPU enabled (and used the SoC GPU for OpenCL/physics/etc.) for the disc (BDXL?) based PS4 games.

quote: AMD, the company who knows how to build fast chips for much lower price than Intel.

I don't think that's true. AMD is the company that's willing to sell what are - quite likely - MORE EXPENSIVE to build chips at a lower price. The "bang for the buck" has to do with end user pricing and performance NOT AMD's costs.

I don't think it's completely unreasonable to believe that Intel could provide competitive (or better) pricing for a volume customer such as Sony; they just don't want to for whatever reason. That reason is probably Intel could make more money selling chips to someone else.

It's also possible that Sony may have gone with AMD for GPU related reasons, rather than price.

Also curious: what's happening in console gaming that's going to make it "heavily multithreaded" all of a sudden?